The research project investigates automated programming techniques for the objective evaluation and education, including socialization, of severely retarded children and young adults. The procedures permit full control over antecedent and reinforcing stimulus events, including social variables, and constitute a comprehensive intervention in the lives of children whose peculiar behavior problems make them difficult or impossible to teach by more traditional methods. The setting is a highly specialized teaching room for the individual child where the interactions between the child and the teaching conditions are intensively examined and modified constructively. The remote programming methods are essentially nonverbal as well as nonsocial, making them highly suitable for severely retarded individuals who have little or no understanding or use of speech, and who demonstrate little appropriate control by the social environment. The evaluation of the effects of social stimuli and interactions and the development of teaching methods to generate constructive responses to social stimuli comprise the long-term goals of the research. The research emphasizes continued study and refinement of programs to teach the child a set of baseline performances necessary to evaluate socially-related stimuli. These performances involve the establishment of complex and topographically-heterogeneous behavior chains based initially on nonsocial conditioned reinforcers and discriminative stimuli.